by Ninie Hammon
She swallowed once, then again before she continued. "Flies, too, big fat green ones … I guess the camper landed closer to the car where her parents' bodies were …"
Wasn't no way Bailey coulda said, "decaying."
"The next morning, there was a spiderweb over the broken window — that was the sparkling dew I painted. And the wasps and flies got caught in the web. She thought God sent a spider named Shannuck to protect her, which, I guess, explains Bambi. And the entomology minor at Pitt."
"I s'pose even if Melody don't remember 'em, Katydid's memories is still in there somewhere, maybe come out in subconscious ways." He was thinking out loud, hearing his own thoughts as he spoke them. "Katydid's the little girl you painted so she's who you hooking up to."
"… which apparently means Katydid and Melody are … what? Two different people? Like a split personality? She certainly had the childhood trauma to earn one!"
"Oh, I don't think I'd go that far, Dissociative Personality Disorder. It ain't like one minute Melody is Melody and the next she's Katydid. That'd be a split personality. If she does have a Katydid personality, it's way down deep in there and it don't get out much."
They heard the front door close and Melody appeared in the doorway to the parlor.
"I'm sorry it took so long. Gardening supplies. The man's taking them around back for me, but I had to sign and the electronic thing for signatures was acting up."
"No need to apologize. We did, after all, show up unannounced," Bailey said.
Melody perched like a small bird on the edge of the wingback chair facing them. On the coffee table between them was a tea set, an ornate, gold-embossed teapot on the silver tray. Melody must have seen T.J. notice it.
"I just made myself some tea, would you like some?"
"Please, don't go to any trouble for us," Bailey said.
"How could it be trouble? It's already made. And you need something to steady you."
She reached over and actually patted Bailey's hand, then gestured toward the china cabinet beside the door. "Just pick out a cup and saucer you like and I'll be right back."
As soon as Melody was out of earshot, Bailey asked, "Is there something … do you smell—?"
"I sure do!"
"Good, I was afraid it was just me, still smelling that awful …"
"Maybe Melody's one of them people who got no sense of smell." T.J. opened the glass door on the china cabinet and tried to find a cup and saucer that didn't look so fragile it could shatter from the weight of the sunlight on it, one that didn't cost more than his house.
"In the wrecked camper … maybe after she clicked off her sense of smell, she never clicked it back on." Bailey reached out and picked up the first cup she saw. "But what is that smell?"
Melody returned with a small pitcher of milk and a sugar bowl piled high with cubes.
"Ahh, that's one of my favorite cups," she said to T.J. as he sat back down, and she poured amber tea into it. "I'd tell you where it came from if I knew." She gestured around the room. "But all of this was here when I moved in."
Melody picked up the little pitcher again.
"No milk for me, thanks," Bailey said. She had mentioned to T.J. once that "in another life" she used to order coffee in restaurants "with a bucket of cream."
He held his hand over his own cup, too, and Melody set the pitcher back down.
"Sugar, then," she said, and without asking plunked a cube of sugar into each of their cups. T.J. stifled a grimace. Neither tea nor coffee should be sweet, in his estimation, though sweet iced tea was a staple of Southern dining. Bailey liked sugar, though. She stirred it into the amber liquid of her cup with the tiny silver spoon from the tray and took a sip.
He picked up the spoon, stirred his, and brought the cup to his lips, but only pretended to sip it.
"Mmmm," Bailey said, and he nodded fake agreement. "Some special blend?"
Melody laughed, a musical sound, a little like the giggle of a small child.
"Hardly. Just plain old Lipton teabags. I am a very simple life form." She sat on the edge of the chair, leaning forward expectantly. "Now tell me, to what do I owe this honor — and it really is an honor, I'm serious. I've wanted to meet you for a long time. What can I do for you? Why are you here?"
Bailey looked at T.J. and he tossed the look right back at her. She was the one said she wanted to wing it. This was the part where she'd fall out of the sky on her head.
Brice stepped out onto the Ferriglianos’ porch and called Nakamura.
"Lucas Ferrigliano works at Andolino's Pies at the mall," he said without preamble.
"How are we just finding that out?"
The question was as much for himself as it was for Brice, but it stung like a personal rebuke all the same. They had both dropped the ball on this. They should have checked, should have known where the boy worked. The fact that it didn't seem important at the time was no excuse. It was their job to check out everything because nothing was important … until it was.
Brice didn't respond, just continued.
"I found a shoebox hidden in the boy's closet. There were pictures of Riley in it — not lewd pictures, but a bunch of them. His parents said it was the girl who works the drive-up window who told them Lucas was out on a delivery and that he'd be right back."
"I'll check."
Nakamura disconnected. Brice stood holding his phone, trying to keep himself from dwelling on the mistake. There'd be plenty of time for second-guessing later. Players who beat themselves up over fumbles before the final whistle usually lost the game.
It wasn't long before Nakamura called back.
"The manager said Lucas came to work this morning, went out on a delivery and never came back. The manager doesn't know where he is."
"Take a look at the back of that pizza parlor. The security camera only shows a view of the drive-in window. But there's an area on the other side of the drive-in window, back behind it where there were a couple of cars, I assumed employees' cars. That area's blocked from view. The boy's car could have been parked there. If he found some way to get that little girl to the back of the department store, he could have put her into his car and there would be no security camera footage to show it."
"Find out from the parents if they know anywhere Lucas would go, somewhere special to him."
"He's in the wind and knows we're looking for him. His mother left him a message."
"Seal the room. I'm going back to the station, to get Arya to track the GPS in the boy's cellphone."
The parents were obviously upset, but even more so when Brice told Agent Trimboli that Nakamura had instructed her not to allow them to go into Lucas's room.
"Why not?" Tony demanded to know.
"Did you find — what did you find in there?" Francine asked.
Brice ignored them, just climbed the stairs and got the box off the desk in the boy's room and took it back downstairs with him.
"What is that? Where are you going with that?" Tony was borderline belligerent but Brice let it go. Now was not the time to get into a pissing match with the boy's father.
"I need to know where you'd look if you were trying to find Lucas, someplace that's special to him, somewhere private."
Mrs. Ferrigliano started to cry.
"This can't be happening. You can't possibly believe my Lucas has some secret place where he … took Riley … No, it can't be."
"We have to find your son now. You say he hasn't done anything wrong — then help us prove it. We can't clear him until we talk to him."
The couple looked at each other.
"There are lots of places where …" Tony shook his head, obviously trying hard to concentrate. Gesturing at the trophies on the wall, he said, "We go hunting in the woods—"
"Where in the woods?"
"Everywhere!" He took a breath. "There's a hunting club, the Mountaineer Sportsmen. About a dozen families. We all have cabins up in the mountains and around the lake."
"You're saying he might
go to your cabin?"
"Not ours, we're putting on a new roof. But we have a roving dinner — every month we go to someone's cabin and have a cookout, eat whatever we've killed or caught since the last cookout. Lucas would feel at home in any one of them."
"I need a list of all those cabins and the addresses for them."
"I'll try."
"Do more than try, Mr. Ferrigliano."
The father turned pale, went into his home office and returned with a printout.
As he drove back to the station, Brice called Nakamura and told him what had happened at the Ferrigliano house.
"Why did the girl working the drive-up window say Lucas had just gone out for a delivery when he's actually been gone all day?" he asked when Brice got to the station. "Honest mistake?"
"Hardly. Bonnie … something …" Brice knew if Nakamura'd had more than a couple of hours sleep in the past four days he wouldn't have dropped the girl's last name. "She's got the hots for the Ferrigliano kid, admitted he'd asked her to cover for him, said he was upset, had to get away for a while and didn't want his boss to know he wasn't working."
Arya called up a grid map of Kavanaugh County on the big monitor, displaying an area in a fifty-mile radius from Shadow Rock, within which they could trace the location of the boy's cellphone if he made a call from it.
Brice produced the shoebox he had found hidden in the top of Lucas Ferrigliano's closet.
"These look real to you?" he asked, pointing to the jewelry.
"Flea market," said Agent Hardesty. Gomez nodded agreement.
Moving the bling aside, Brice indicated the mound of photographs beneath.
"These aren't kiddie porn. Not even borderline. Does this track with you?"
Nakamura studied the pictures, picking each one up in a gloved hand and looking at it thoroughly before handing it off and picking up the next one. When he'd examined them all, he said, "There's nothing sexual here."
"No, but this kid has an unhealthy interest in a boy half his age," Gomez said. "There's something not right about that."
Brice and Nakamura joined Fletch and the other agents crowded around the computer monitor. Though he tried to avert his gaze, Brice couldn't control his glance at the accusing clock face on the wall. Marley Ewing had been missing for two hours now.
Tick. Tick. Tick.
"There is no cell service in most of those hollows — walls are too steep for signals to get in," Brice told the agents. "If Lucas is in one of—"
A red light began to pulse on the map.
Arya smiled. "He's making a call. That's him."
Brice consulted the list of names and addresses Lucas's father had provided to him.
"That's Edward O'Halloran's place. It's up on a ridge. It's not just a hunting cabin. He lives there."
Nakamura picked up the displeasure in Brice's voice. "And that's not a good thing because …?"
"Ed owns the hardware store and I'm betting with the personal arsenal he’s got in that cabin he could hold off all the blond men in the Norwegian Army."
"Ed's out of town," Fletch said, and everyone turned to look at him. It was the first time he'd said anything since delivering his report at the mall. "I was in the store buying a shovel the other day and Amanda was working the cash register — said Ed left that morning to take Hannah up to the Mayo Clinic for treatments. She's got breast cancer."
"When was that?" Brice asked and saw the look of determined concentration take over Fletch's face that meant he was thinking hard.
Deputy Tackett stepped into the room. "Just got a call from a Mr. Andolino," he said to Nakamura. "Said you told him to call if he heard from Lucas. The boy just called Bonnie Shepherd … and she started bawling, told him to run!"
Brice ground his teeth.
"It was Tuesday," Fletch said, and everyone turned to him again. "That's when I bought the shovel. Ed O'Halloran hasn't been in that cabin since the day before Riley Campbell disappeared."
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Bailey smiled at T.J. when he didn't offer to bail her out, but the look in her eyes was sharp as the bristles on a hedgehog.
"Well … Brice told you, didn't he, that I offered to help him find Riley Campbell?"
At the mention of the child, Melody paled, looked like she had been kicked in the belly.
"Riley!" There was anguish in her voice and her eyes filled with tears. "He was such … he is, he is such a sweet little boy! Oh, I know, they're all sweet. But Riley's special, so serious for his age. Solemn. I sometimes wondered if something was bothering him and I made up opportunities to hang out with him — let him clean the blackboards, help load the paperback books in my car. Little things like that, so if he had something he wanted to talk about. But …"
She fell silent and her next breath sounded a little like a stifled sob.
"What was it Brice thought you could do to help him find Riley? Did going to my classroom the other day help?"
Again, Bailey looked at T.J. Again, he hung her out to dry.
"Maybe you don't know, but police departments sometimes use people with … special abilities to help them find missing children."
"Psychics? Are you a psychic?"
Before she could answer, Melody asked, “Is that what that was, before, when you were looking at my locket? Were you—?"
"No, well, not exactly."
Melody sat back. "If you're concerned that I don't believe in what psychics can do …" She got an odd look on her face. "Things happen sometimes that you can't explain. I know that sometimes there just isn't a rational explanation."
"Actually, what I can do … it didn't help in this case."
Again she looked at T.J. and he pretended he didn't notice. He was definitely going to pay for that.
"I paint portraits." Bailey stopped, struggled for words, but stumbled forward. "It's a little like going into a trance and I have no control over what I'm painting. Then I come back to myself and there's this picture. A couple of months ago, I painted a picture of a little girl who drowned."
Melody said nothing, all her focus on Bailey.
Bailey kept going, told her about the portrait of Macy Cosgrove, said the painting had saved the little girl's life.
"So that's why … after I heard about Riley, I offered to try to help Brice find him. He gave me a snapshot of the boy, but the portrait I painted wasn't Riley. It was a picture of … you."
"Me? You painted a portrait of me? May I see it?"
"You wouldn't want to see it."
"Why not?"
"Because it's not a picture of you now, today. It's a picture of you as a little girl."
"Seriously?"
Bailey nodded.
"But why wouldn't I want to see that?"
Again, Bailey looked at T.J. and this time he took the handoff, figured if he didn't the cost of payback'd bankrupt him. But this whole conversation felt odd, off somehow that he couldn't put his finger on. Melody hadn't blinked at the description of what Bailey could do. Hadn't asked a single question, put up a single protest. Who heard a tale like that and swallowed it whole?
"My mama had the same gift, painted portraits like Bailey's."
He paused for a beat, but Melody asked for no explanation.
"And they was pictures of tragedies. Like train wrecks. Or like that drowned girl. Some awful tragedy that's gonna happen … unless you do something to stop it. That portrait of you, though, it kinda flips the script, don't fit the pattern of the others."
"How so?"
"I painted a portrait of you at age seven when your parents were killed in the car wreck."
Melody didn't respond emotionally in any way to the revelation.
"You knew about the wreck that killed my parents?"
"No, not at first, we didn't," he said. "We just seen the painting of this little girl … in the wreck."
"I don't remember the accident. The doctors said I'll never remember what happened and why would I want to? Why would anybody want to remember so
mething that horrible, carry those images around in your head?"
"Then you absolutely don't want to see the portrait I painted."
Bailey said the words so forcefully that she sloshed the tea in her cup and a few drips fell on her jeans. She didn't seem to notice, just took another drink and set the cup back down in its saucer.
"Wait a minute … how did you know the painting was of me? If all you did was paint a portrait of a little girl in a car wreck, how did you know that little girl was me?"
"I didn't. We did some detective work to find out."
"We wasn't just being nosey." T.J. felt like he had to put that in there. "We was looking for a link to help us find Riley."
"It didn't help, though, did it? You couldn't find any connection at all, not a thing that linked me to what happened to Riley."
That struck T.J. as an odd thing to say and he glanced at Bailey, but she didn't seem to be focused on the conversation.
"So how did you find me?"
"We hired a private investigator. And we talked to the Bartleys, of course." T.J. left it there, hoping she'd offer an explanation of her disappearance. She didn't, so he asked. "How come you vanished like you done, never said a word to them folks after that party?"
An emotion flashed across her face and was gone so fast he decided he hadn't really seen it at all. Couldn't have. The emotion was anger. No, rage.
"I needed to become new," she said, as if that made perfect sense.
It occurred to him then — the spider? Them boys had ripped the legs off a rubber spider. Since Katydid thought God had sent a spider to save her, maybe—
Melody turned her head and fingered the caramel curls that danced at the end of her ponytail. "Blonde hair is easy to color — like putting paint on a white wall. I almost picked red but I'm so glad I didn't because Darren …"